Explaining Digital Humanities in Promotion Documents

In preparing my tenure and promotion dossier I was advised that I needed to explain my fields and contextualize my work in a more accessible way. Without many models for doing this, I made up my own rules, then tore apart my dossier, then re-assembled it, then tore it apart again (this happened 3 more times), then revised my narratives (this happened 6 more times). I received some well-meaning but conflicting advice and ultimately had to make up my own mind about how best to sell Digital Humanities, scholarly editing, and Digital Pedagogy to my colleagues. I received much help from the twitter-verse, but I really wish that a storehouse or consulting arena existed for this kind of professional documentation. As a Digital Humanist, I do so much that’s ephemeral but integral to my work. This is true with Digital Pedagogy and scholarly editing, too.

With that being said, I offer up my statement as a faculty member at a teaching-intensive, Master’s-granting, large public/state university (30,000 students). I teach a 4-4 with 4 preps, often 1 new each semester. I also submitted a scholarship activity report and revised one category to fit the “public scholarship” and “community outreach” sections of my CV. Appended to that section is a description of my digital archive, now a legacy project because we were never able to migrate it to TEI but wanted to maintain it as a scholarly edition. Money was a huge factor with that decision. But, the archive is used constantly in classrooms and cited in traditional work. That’s the marker of success in Digital Humanities (to me).

What follows is the primary document explaining my role as a Digital Humanist and scholarly editor.[Part 1] I’ve also appended my research statement, but it’s very, very long.[Part 2] I include my work on Twitter and my blog. That language might be helpful for some. In the dossier, I also include an explanation of my digital archive, complete with citations from the last 7 years. It’s too long to include here, but I was very careful to explain the value of a digital archive that doesn’t meet current standards for technology. I’m calling it a legacy project.

Candidate’s Statement for Promotion to Associate Professor

Since September 2005, San Jose State University has provided me with a foundation to explore both traditional and non-traditional venues for service, teaching and scholarship. Because we are situated in Silicon Valley, we have the unique opportunity to form industry partnerships with Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and others. As a literary scholarly, this is perhaps a more difficult task than science or business faculty. Because I received support from former Dean Karl Toepfer (Section 6: I.B.6), Academic Technology (see Section 5: I.A.6), the English Department (Section 6: I.B.2), and the scholarly community at large (see External Reviews Section 7), I have been able to accomplish much as a literary scholar and a Digital Humanist, a field that relies on collaboration and inter-disciplinarity:

The digital humanities is an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Developing from an earlier field called humanities computing, today digital humanities embrace a variety of topics ranging from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets. Digital Humanities currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from the traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, computational analysis) and digital publishing.[1]

More specifically, my role in Digital Humanities is as a scholarly editor engaged in recovering unknown literary works by women; in other words, I use technology to create and disseminate open-access digital archives of otherwise inaccessible print materials with my primary work being The Forget Me Not Archive. The Modern Language Association defines scholarly digital editions as follows:

One of the most useful contributions of digital humanists has been to create online scholarly electronic editions of resources of interest from historical documents to literary works. While there are many electronic versions of classic literary texts, often put up in a bout of enthusiasm by students, scholarly electronic editions represent significant careful and informed work that can be accessed widely. The work of the electronic editor is not trivial — he or she has to make a series of decisions informed by knowledge of the context and original about what to show and hide, how to enrich the material, and how to represent it online. The opportunities and fluidity of the electronic form mean the editor must master two fields, the intellectual context of the work and current practices in digital representation.[2]

Though Digital Humanities has been established as a field for more than four decades, evaluating the work produced by a Digital Humanist can sometimes be daunting. To aid in that endeavor, the Modern Language Association, the governing body for English Departments, recently crafted guidelines for evaluating Digital Work along with other resources for evaluating digital work. One of the most important features is the impact a particular digital work has on the scholarly community. Not only has the data from my archive been migrated to an updated and technologically-standardized sister archive, but faculty, students, and scholars have also continued to cite and use The Forget Me Not Archive, as is evidenced by the materials included in this dossier.

More recently, I have pushed Digital Humanists to incorporate students into their research and have been part of the growing number of Digital Humanists who also use Digital Pedagogy in the college classroom. With an underlying commitment to integrating, exploring and intellectualizing technology and its tools, my scholarship, teaching, and service has allowed me to become part of a cutting-edge movement that is re-shaping the Humanities. The 4Humanities movement, spear-headed by senior scholar and UC Santa Barbara literature professor, Alan Liu, invited me to participate in a campaign about the value of the Humanities and Digital Humanities. As the Digital Pedagogy representative in the video, I am pleased to be grouped with Johanna Drucker and Alan Liu, two imminent scholars in both the literary and Digital Humanities fields.

As a tenured Assistant Professor of English Literature, I teach not only literature, but also all types of cultural texts that will prepare our students for their professional lives. Keeping this in mind as well as the goals and missions of San José State University, I always look for methods to better my teaching, including improving lectures, incorporating interesting assignments, providing historical and cultural background, inviting other faculty to guest lectures, proposing new courses or implementing new and varied types of technology. I consistently teach in Smart rooms using websites, digital tools, movies, and more, to bring literature to life. I have paid attention to peer reviewers’ comments, students’ informal and formal evaluations, and colleagues’ suggestions — the end result is that my courses have improved both for my students and myself.

Though I employ traditional lecture, writing, discussion and student-centered classroom activities, I also believe in integrating our students’ quotidian knowledge to unpack texts. To this end, I speak to them through technology. Each course is accompanied by: an online course website which I design, code, and update daily; and a commitment to introducing relevant technology tools. There is a certain art to using technology in the classroom, and at times, it can overwhelm the content. At other times, it can empower students to the point where I can become a mediator of their discussions. (For an assessment of my experiments with technology in the classroom, see a letter from the Incubator Classroom’s Instructional Designer Menko Johnson, Section 5: I.A.6 “Other Evaluations”.) Students struggle with and appreciate the use of technology in the classroom; see two students’ unsolicited letters (Section 5: I.A.6 “Other Evaluations”). I continue to develop a relationship with Silicon Valley industry by using their tools in my classrooms; with these continued relationships, it is my hope that these industry partners will fiscally contribute and support our university.

In order to stay current with quickly-evolving pedagogical and scholarly issues and to encourage the discussion around pedagogy and technology, I maintain a research blog, http://triproftri.wordpress.com, where my conference papers (some with video), recent scholarly adventures, and new ideas live for the scholarly community to review and comment upon. Among others, my post, “Silence in the Archives?,” was recognized by DHNow as their Editor’s Choice.[3] At the 2013 Modern Association Language Convention, this topic will be more fully discussed during my talk at the “Digital Archives and their Margins” panel with Dr. Alan Galey. This topic was also the inspiration for my guest lecture at Scripps College in Fall 2013 as well as a special cluster of articles for Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2014. I also contribute to the Romantic Circles Pedagogies blog and am one of the key bloggers for FairMatters, a Norton Publishers blog about literature, teaching, and publishing (see contract with Norton Publishers). You may also find me conversing with students and colleagues over Twitter as @triproftri. Both my blogging and tweeting have lead to numerous invitations to speak about my work on literary annuals, Gothic short stories, Digital Humanities, scholarly editing, and most frequently, Digital Pedagogy. See a list of those recent talks (most of which occurred during my Spring 2012 sabbatical) on my blog.

There is now quite a bit of documentation regarding my tenure case. I think that a careful reading of it will demonstrate the ways in which I have tried to respond to all legitimate criticism of my work and my teaching in good faith and with concrete actions.

These are only highlights of what I have been able to achieve here at San Jose State University At the outset of each dossier section, I have included a detailed statement of activities. I revel in my mission as a teacher-scholar and would not be able to produce anything of relevance without the enthusiasm and dedication of our students. As a graduate of California State University, Los Angeles, I understand how much they have sacrificed to be here. I look forward to continuing my relationship with them and to connecting them with the world at-large.

Statement on Scholarly Activities

As with most Digital Humanists, my work straddles the traditional and non-traditional worlds of scholarship. In addition to embracing social networking in order to advance scholarly conversations, I have also been working on two traditional projects that focus on nineteenth-century print culture.

Public Scholarship

With the open access movement and the rapid pace of scholarly conversations, I have become one of the many voices in a vibrant online community of Digital Humanities and literary scholars. Foremost among my social networking conversations is my participation on Twitter as @triproftri. These conversations often lead to blog posts that become conference presentations that also become articles and larger projects to be disseminated in open access journals. In this section, I highlight my pursuit of open conversation with my colleagues across international boundaries and have become a leader in Digital Pedagogy and Digital Humanities because of these social networking conversations.

In the interest of being a public intellectual, this blog hosts my conference papers, slideshows, grant proposals, book projects, reviewers’ comments, calls for papers, position papers, and article drafts on a variety of topics. triproftri blog posts have been cited in Debates in the Digital Humanities (see Brier & Waltzer articles) as well as ongoing online conversations in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Digital Humanities Now, and colleagues’ blog posts on literary research, pedagogy, digital archives. See the pingbacks at the conclusion of each post.

Assessing the impact of blogs in tenure and promotion cases continues to be difficulty in most cases. “Hits” or visits to a blog post can be interpreted as readership. Though there are several reasons why a particular blog post might obtain a high number of visitors, evidence of engagement with a larger scholarly community can be signaled by citation in other blogs and articles. For instance, my blog has received 13,099 visitors March 2010-September 2012; at the time that I submitted this dossier, I have authored a total of 45 posts with 221 comments directly submitted to the triproftri blog site. URLs of my blog posts have been tweeted 698 times. See attached stats for blog post hits monthly and daily. See the Top Posts summary.

The most viewed post with 1098 hits, “Acknowledgements on Syllabi,” was posted in March 2012 and was then cited in numerous other posts (including a Chronicle of Higher Educationarticle) and received 48 distinct tweets that forwarded the URL.

Because of my numerous conference presentations and triproftri blogging, Norton Publishers contracted me for a year to write blog posts for their Fairmatter.com blog — along with two other literary scholars. See contract with Norton Publishers.

In 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, I was selected to participate in the project, A Day in the Life of Digital Humanist, along with approximately 75 other scholars, students, and technologists. On a single day in March during both years, all participants blogged about their tasks for that day. As it happens, both days fell on teaching days for me. My blog, though not peer reviewed, is considered a large-scale collaborative research publication — my blog in particular chronicles the mission of a teaching-focused university and demonstrates the innovation and versatility of our students, an important voice that is often lost in Digital Humanities. See letter from project coordinator, Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, a senior colleague in Digital Humanities.

Published Works: Digital Archive & Scholarly Edition

The Forgotten Gothic: Short Stories from British Literary Annuals 1823-1831, a print edition of 19th-century gothic short stories; includes a critical introduction on the impact of 1820s British literary annual and Gothicism & relevant appendices. 2012, Zittaw Press.

This project, another edition, offers more than 95 heretofore unstudied short stories from nineteenth-century literary annuals. Using specific definitions to identify these Gothic short stories from over 300 volumes of literary annuals, I created a collection that includes engravings and exact transcriptions using the protocols required by the Modern Language Association, the governing body for all language and literature scholarly projects. This project required knowledge of nineteenth-century literary and publishing contents and expertise in scholarly editing. Scholars have only recently begun rifling through the literary remains of the Gothic short story published in the 1820s — primarily because collections of literary annuals, like Gothic chapbooks, are scarce. The collection, critical introduction, and appendices, published in December 2012 and the focus of my keynote talk for the Studies in Gothic Fiction Conference last Spring, provides evidence that nineteenth-century Gothic literature evolved from taboo novels filled with tales of foreign adventure into short stories about the English countryside — still outfitted with ghosts, moral imperatives and a hero but acceptable because they were published in literary annuals. See contract with Zittaw Press.

Because collections of British literary annuals are difficult to find in any library, I created a digital archive from my private collection of The Forget Me Not annuals: “Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive,” an open-access digital collection of the first literary annual. The Archive, conforming to standards for early digital scholarly editions, is now considered a legacy project because of the rapid shifts in technological standards for digital archives. Its metadata was migrated to Text Encoding Initiative (a mark-up language that allows for searching) and incorporated into The Poetess Archive Database, a project that has been peer reviewed by the governing body for nineteenth-century studies. Because the metadata and images live within the larger database with many other materials by nineteenth-century authors, the original Forget Me Not Archive will remain in its current instantiation as a scholarly edition. As one of the original digital projects to be included in the MLA International Bibliography and the focus of my participation in the first annual Nebraska Digital Workshop in 2006, The Forget Me Not Archive still provides valuable access to this hidden genre — most recently cited in the below materials:

See Statement about External Reviews and External Reviewers’ letters directly following this Statement. This panel of reviewers was assembled to assess my scholarly work for the 4th year dossier. Prof. Stephen Behrendt assessed my work overall in 2010. And, the senior scholars in Digital Humanities added their support in 2010 during my request for tenure. See also General Editor, Dr. Laura Mandell’s letter regarding the migration of The Forget Me Not Archive’s data to The Poetess Archive.

Newsletters & Other Writings

“Infusing Bibliography and Book History with Hyper-Textuality: A Course for Undergraduates” in Supplement to Teaching Bibliography and Book History. Ed. Ann Hawkins. (July 2006)

“Outside the Canon: Inside the BWWC.” Writing Women: A Newsletter for the 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers 8:1 (Spring 2007): 1-2.

Academic Outreach & Knowledge Mobilization

Now, scholarship takes many forms. Though not peer-reviewed, the below online materials represent a substantial amount of work in the process of crafting each area of my literary and Digital Humanities/Pedagogy expertise.

Work-in-Progress

In this book project, the full manuscript, an expanded and significantly revised version of my dissertation, is currently under consideration with Ohio University Press. An abridged chapter is forthcoming in Textual Cultures, Spring 2013. The project had been previously positively reviewed by the editor and readers for Indiana University Press. However, due to internal conflicts, the manuscript was not published with IUP. See letter from Dr. Wayne Storey, series editor with Indiana UP.

Bibliographical Society (England) Research Grant for further research on literary annuals at the British Library, etc., London, April 2007

Rare Book School Scholarship for Tuition, University of Virginia, November 2006

Invited Workshop Participant presenting on “Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive,” First Annual Nebraska Digital Workshop, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, September 2006

San Jose State University

Semester Sabbatical (Spring 2012), to continue work on literary history monograph

Leader, English Department Cohort of Faculty using Innovative Technology in Pedagogy, San Jose State University, to aid in instructional design for faculty using experimental computer classroom, awarded December 2009 for Spring 2010 & Fall 2010

Member, Technology and the Classroom Faculty Learning Group, San Jose State University, invited to join group of faculty to discuss technology and pedagogy best practices, awarded January 2010 for Spring 2010

College of Arts & Humanities Release Time, San Jose State University, one course release for Fall 2008 to draft and present two conference papers and continue adding content to the “Forget Me Not Archive,” awarded April 2008

Student Success Grant, San Jose State University, one course release in Fall 2007 to create a General Education Digital Literature course, complete a Digital Humanities Center proposal and discover best pedagogical practices for a technology-rich classroom environment, April 2007

Jr. Faculty Professional Development Grant, San Jose State University, to fund student assistant’s work on scholarly collection of Gothic short stories from literary annuals, April 2007

Grant Development Program, San Jose State University, one course release in Spring 2007 to prepare an NEH Scholarly Editions grant for submission in Nov. 2007, awarded December 2006

College of Arts & Humanities Release Time, San Jose State University, one course release to conduct research and continue drafting articles and a book manuscript in Spring 2007, awarded December 2006

California State University Research Grant, San Jose State University, to continue research and assembly of Forget Me Not! The Popular Phenomenon of Literary Annuals book manuscript, awarded November 2006

Small Faculty Grant, San Jose State University, for Fall 2006 Graduate Assistant work on “Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive,” awarded May 2006

California State University Research Grant for further work on “Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive,” awarded November 2005

Graduate Student Assistant Program Grant for Spring 2006 Graduate Assistant for further work on “Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive,” awarded Jan. 2006

Conferences

[Note: Also to focus the argument in my dossier, I exclude the papers and images presented at conferences and instead supply only a list of 1) invited talks, keynotes & plenaries, 2) workshops that I've given, and 3) conference presentations. The list is very, very long; the ordering of the categories became important to highlight that I've begun to be invited places. I also highlighted the top conferences in my field, but I forgot to mention that some, like the Digital Humanities Conference, are peer-reviewed.]

I continue to present several times each year at both national and international conferences on Romantic-era literature, literary annuals, history of the book, Digital Humanities, and pedagogy. During 2011 and 2012, I received several requests to conduct workshops or give keynote speeches.

The Modern Language Association is the seminal organization for the fields of Literature and Languages; an invitation to this convention not only signals emerging work in the field, but also acceptance by an audience with the largest number of colleagues. To this end, I was invited to participate in a panel at the 2012 MLA Convention and was accepted to run a digital pedagogy roundtable. At the 2013 Convention, I have again been invited to participate on a panel regarding Digital Humanities and women’s authorship in 19th-century England.

During my sabbatical in Spring 2012, I gave workshops on Digital Pedagogy. Dr. Jentery Sayers and I worked with NITLE (National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education) to present a one- hour webinar on Digital Pedagogy. Digital Humanities in the undergraduate classroom differs slightly from Digital Pedagogy. The latter deals with implementing tools in the curriculum to allow students to gain a set of hard skills in technology as well as to open up the possibilities for learning. Digital Humanities, for me, in a curriculum involves asking students to build something. I talked about doing just this and collaborating with our Special Collections in a presentation for the American Library Association Conference 2012 with Dr. Danelle Moon, SJSU’s Special Collections Director.

I continue to be active in the field of Digital Humanities and British Romantic-era Literature. The list of conferences and roundtables is listed in the following pages, but most important is the fact that I have begun to offer keynotes in my fields and be recognized by my colleagues as an expert among them.

[1] The Wikipedia entry was authored as a collaborative effort by Digital Humanists, including the senior scholars in the field. It’s as comprehensive as possible. See also Matthew Kirschenbaum’s article, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” (ADE Bulletin 20 [2010]). The article appears in the journal produced by literature studies’ governing body, the Modern Language Association. ↩

[3] In an effort to recognize the value of blogging, the Digital Humanities community established DHNow, Digital Humanities Now, which “showcases the scholarship and news of interest to the digital humanities community, through a process of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review.” ↩

About
Katherine D. Harris

Katherine D. Harris, a tenured Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, San José State University, specializes in Romantic-Era and 19th-century British literature, women’s authorship, the literary annual, 19th-century history print culture and history of the book, textuality, editorial theory, Digital Humanities, and pedagogy. Her work ranges from pedagogical articles on using digital tools in the classroom to traditional scholarship on a “popular” literary form in 19th-century England. She chronicled her teaching adventures in the March 2011 blog, A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities, along with 200 other participants which turned into a plenary address for the 2012 Re: Humanities and an article about the successes and failures of teaching with digital tools, “TechnoRomanticism: Creating Digital Editions in an Undergraduate Classroom” (Journal of Victorian Culture April 2011). Because of this work, Harris has been named to the Council on Digital Humanities for the National Institute of Technology in Liberal Education and co-taught a week-long seminar in Digital Pedagogy at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria. In January 2012, she represented Digital Pedagogy as a panelist at the DHCommons pre-conference workshop, “Getting Started in Digital Humanities,” at the 2012 Modern Language Association Convention. Harris writes about her most recent pedagogical adventures over at FairMatter.com, a blog hosted by W.W. Norton Publishers.